Today's direct mail house must be flexible in order to respond quickly to ever changing marketing demands from customers. The world is deeply entrenched in the digital age. Digital technologies are here to stay and the mailing industry must maximize efforts to stay with the times. One objective of the mailing industry is to get messages, statements, documents and merchandise to the correct recipient within the prescribed timeframe in order to secure the desired response. To properly address this problem requires a new approach, one that breaks with incremental solutions offering from the past.
In the mailing industry, customers are dealing with a rapidly changing industry, an evolving workforce, and environment of increasing regulation. The industry has several pressures facing each customer, vendor, supplier and 3rd party entities. The largest cost factor or cost element in producing mail is the postage. The industry faces double digit increases that are driving alternative methods by dealing with these extra pressures. This eliminates the cost of paper processing by abolishing the entire paper processing and using technology of the internet and email to reduce the need of the United States Postal Service. Noticeably, electronic document delivery and e-billing provides High Volume Mailing professionals the opportunity to achieve substantial reduction in print and mail costs. Overall electronic document delivery will continue to grow as an importance for all mailers, of all sizes.
The direct mail production process is an extremely complicated process with several incremental steps. Take for example a bank mailing the monthly bank statements to several thousand, or even million, bank customers. The banking records must be extracted from databases, processed into the proper format for a statement, printed out, separated, combined with other mailing items, folded, inserted into mailing envelopes, and sorted by postal codes to achieve mailing discounts. This entire process must be verifiable, so that the bank has reasonable proof that the mailing was properly assembled and mailed to each customer. Achieving efficiency for such processing is difficult.
Today, it is not enough for a company to provide great module technology. Integrated solutions supported by numerous products to maximize postal savings, which are regulated by the United States Postal Service, and other factors are needed to solve the aforementioned issues in the industry.